Death of a Wrecker

"Foreign governments requested his counsel on agricultural matters: Joseph Stalin, for example, in 1931 invited him to superintend cotton plantations in southern Russia and to make a tour of the Soviet Union, but Carver refused." http://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Washington-Carver

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Pravda
October 29, 1937

G. W. Carver was convicted yesterday by the Supreme Court of the USSR of wrecking activities.

Carver, an American, has been resident in the USSR since 1931, when he arrived in the country, allegedly to help Soviet agriculture and industry. In fact, he was from the beginning an agent of imperialist intelligence services, and an accomplice of Leon Trotsky, with whom he secretly met on an alleged "scientific mission" to Turkey before arriving in the USSR. The Carver-Trotsky plan was to undermine the Soviet state by large-scale schemes to convert large amounts of farmland to peanut production, so that there would not be enough grain and Soviet people would starve. Meanwhile, most of the supposed uses for the peanut which Carver claimed to have discovered turned out to be fraudulent.

Carver's guilt was established by his own confession as well as by the confessions of his accomplices.

Carver was convicted under Article 58-7 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, which provides that

"The undermining of state production, transport, trade, monetary relations or the credit system, or likewise cooperation, done with counterrevolutionary purposes, by means of corresponding use of state institutions and enterprises or impeding their normal activity, and likewise use of state institutions and enterprises or impeding their activity, done in the interests of former owners or interested capitalist organizations, shall be punishable by--measures of social defense, indicated in article 58-2 of this code."
http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/uk58-e.html#58-7

Considering the especially grave consequences of Carver's wrecking activities, he was sentenced to the supreme measure of social defense--shooting.

Those present at the trial greeted the verdict with great satisfaction. The response from progressive people throughout the world has also been favorable. Paul Robeson has stated that "American Negroes have always known Carver as an Uncle Tom who did nothing to fight for his people's rights, so it really is no surprise that he has been shown to be an enemy of the USSR."

Carver's appeal for clemency has been rejected by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

The sentence has been carried out.
 
Perhaps I should read up on what GWC did OTL after 1931 to get a better sense of where this might be going. But very sadly, assuming as I do right now that his major impact on the status of African-Americans (and also I guess the general level of knowledge of what can be done with peanuts) would have been well before 1931 and his ATL departure to the Soviet Union, then his clearly unjust execution in the Purges here will have very little impact. OTL lots of Americans, including African-Americans, went to the USSR in the Twenties and early Thirties, only to have the tides of official opinion turn against them in the later Thirties. Not all were executed, but the distinctive American presence of the survivors was toned down. Nor would Carver, as far as I happen to know right now, be indispensable in some post-1937 evolution of American policy and society--though that might just be gross ignorance on my part I confess. He might have played some catalytic role I don't know about.

But since rather than have him fall down some stairs (or be pushed by some Klansmen) you have him killed in Stalin's purges, I suppose the ATL is more about where he goes in it than his non-presence in the USA after '31 or his death in '37.

And to be brutal about it, what's one more show trial and execution among hundreds of thousands?

Is it the impact on African-Americans, turning more of them away from Communism? Well, I don't have the impression that African-Americans ever supported the CP en masse, though one might argue they should have since it was the only party that stood against racial segregation for a long time in US politics.

Nevertheless, while a fair number of American Communists probably were African-American, very few African-Americans were Communist even so. So if this event is meant to make a big change by dissuading them from involving themselves with the CP--well, that won't be much of a change. The few who did join the CP OTL probably were people who wouldn't let something like this change their minds, particularly since Carver took a very cautious approach toward AA advancement, one that accepted the disabilities racism imposed as something AAs could resolve only by pleasing whites enough to dissolve their irrational hatreds slowly. The kind of people who would become Communists would dismiss such advice as compromised beyond toleration and wonder only why Stalin had ever looked to Carver for help in the first place.

I don't see it as a particularly crucial event for the consciousness of Americans or Westerners in general about the nature of the Soviet society or Stalin's running of the Communist International either. Again there are plenty other outrages of this type OTL. Again people will either tune it out, or convince themselves there must be good reasons, or accept that their side has its ugly aspects but it is still necessary either to be a Communist or to work with them for the greater good--or they will add this one to an already effectively infinitely long list of reasons why the Communists are the scum of humanity whose defeat (by a whole range of means depending on the person--in this time of course including those bent on extermination of the whole Soviet Union and all its people) is to be devoutly hoped for and worked toward.

In short I hardly see right now how switching George Washington Carver's fate around like this is going to make a significant ripple in history, terrible as it might be in terms of justice. It is no more terrible than what did happen to a lot of people OTL after all.

So where is this going?

I am prepared, sort of anyway, to be surprised and humbled.
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Could it be that despite the way the story hook runs, the real story here is what Carver did in the USSR in the six years before the Purge? That he may be dead and his name erased from Soviet media--but his useful deeds make a difference?

I wonder if Khrushchev will rehabilitate his memory. Heck, Stalin himself would be cynical enough to do it if it served his purposes.

Fun fact; the Great Purge was not called any name that blamed Stalin for them, whatever it was people knew or believed--it was called the "Yezhovchina," after police head Yezhov--who himself was turned on and executed, and thus became the goat for all the destruction he carried out on Stalin's behalf. Stalin excelled at getting others to dirty their hands on his behalf.
 
Probably the only major effect will be to make the Communist Party somewhat less popular among African Americans, though hard-core Stalinists among them will of course defend the execution. (Maybe I am not being totally fair to Robeson, though. That wasn't how he reacted to the arrest of Itzik Feffer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polit...d_concert_in_Tchaikovsky_Hall_.28June_1949.29 But Robeson knew Feffer personally; I'm not aware that he had the same kind of friendship with Carver.)

Anyway, I did not have any particular follow-up in mind; I simply had read about Carver's being invited to go to the USSR, and wondered if he might have been caught up in the Great Purge if he did, and then tried to construct a plausible scenario for that happening. Incidentally, Carver's assistant Jack Sutton did go to the Soviet Union. "Sutton learned to speak Russian, married a Russian girl, and for some time seemed to be happily raising a biracial family in the Communist hinterland. After seven years, however, Sutton was caught up in one of Stalin's waves of xenophobia. He was ejected from the country, compelled to leave his family behind..." https://books.google.com/books?id=CXs-CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT276 Expulsion rather than arrest and execution is probably the more likely fate of Carver as well, if he had gone (especially since the Soviets would be aware of his popularity among African Americans).
 
Probably the only major effect will be to make the Communist Party somewhat less popular among African Americans, though hard-core Stalinists among them will of course defend the execution.

Considering that the CPUSA lost a lot of black support in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it might be interesting to see a turn towards anarchism. (Note that several Black radicals, particularly former members of the BPP, did turn that way in the late 60s/early 70s.)
 
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